The advent of the World Wide Web has placed more information at the fingertips of today's users than ever before. Various websites cater to nearly every need and interest, providing access to reference information, business and financial documents, social networking, and more. Widespread broadband Internet access provides faster access to these sites than ever before.
However, as fast as current high-speed Internet services are, the act of browsing the web is not instantaneous. When a user selects a link on a page or enters a uniform resource locator (URL) in a text field, there is a delay while data is requested from the host, sent to the client, and rendered in the browser. Web pages are typically provided as hypertext markup language (HTML) documents. These documents are constructed of text strings that define the structure and content of the associated web page. In order to utilize the text strings to display the web page, the text strings are parsed and processed by software executing on the client, such as a web browser. The parsing and processing of these text strings requires time and system resources of the client. On electronic devices that have fewer system resources to devote to the display of web content, such as mobile devices, these parsing and processing steps may cause a noticeable delay in the display of the associated web content. Sending the HTML content as text strings may also be inefficient, as string data types may require more data and a larger memory footprint than alternatives.